Sunday, February 27, 2005

Chico Martinez died suddenly on February 18. He was honored with a gathering of hundreds of friends and family on February 25 in his home town of Trinidad, Colorado. Old pals from Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, showed up to pay their respects for this activist, cultural warrior, role model, leader. In the audience were musicians, politicos, bureaucrats, teachers, religious leaders, farmers and ranchers, students, viejitas and babies - gente. I watched the crowd as Chico's photos flashed across the front of the Christian Fellowship Church that served as the setting for his services. Their expressions of love and respect were genuine, so real you could feel the emotion swarm around all of us in that church. This guy literally touched the souls of all those he met.

The Pueblo Chieftain ran an obituary that you can access at this link and where you can get a small idea about the shock of his death and the effect the man had on his community.

I met Chico at Colorado State University back when some of us (the Chicano students) had been trying to organize our own brand of the revolution. He had transferred to the Fort Collins university from Southern Colorado State College in Pueblo and he had an immediate impact on all of us. The guy was filled with energy, music, commitment - life. He took the student movement from the sterile halls of the academy into the vibrant northern Colorado Chicano community where he established himself, published a newsletter, took on the local causes, started the first of his three families. He became Chico "El Perico" Martinez. I always thought that Chico was what the Movement was supposed to be. He was a hard act to follow, a tough image to live up to.

He never showed, to me at least, the burn-out or weariness that so many of us know. They say he had a massive heart attack. He had filled that heart with love and struggle - there's only so much any heart can take.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

There's a lot of Chicano authors in the detective and mystery genres (and others). Maybe Ramos or somebody already adequately explained why, or will, one day.

I want to focus on spec lit (speculative--which includes, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, etc.) that's got Chicano characters in it, was written by a Chicano or somehow mixes us with these genres. I like such literature; I try to write it; I grew up reading it.

One of my grandfathers was a newspaper guy who published his own until he was run out of Mexico by a politically sensitive sheriff brandishing una pistola. That's the huevón side of my family. My other mexicano grandfather was said to have been a linguist-intellectual who spoke eight languages. Who knows? After the families crossed the border, the literacy level went down for a time, much was lost; my dad only spoke two languages, read sci-fi, back in the fifties.

He was from the cabrón side of my family. Typical aloof macho, child and wife beater, a frustrated electrician who let alcohol bring him down from the heights of aerospace electronics, back when the only time you saw any other mescan in the jet plane hangar was if he had a mop in his hand. Maybe my dad couldn't handle his success; that's why he drank. I've been there.

Anyway, he always read at night, mags and paperbacks, always sci-fi. One night before his fall from the Garden of Success, we all climbed into bed with him and he read us a short story. I think it was called "The Rag Thing," about una gara that'd fallen behind a stove, collected grease and dust and somehow came alive, grew monstrous and went into town to eat the whole thing and everybody in it.

Problem is, my dad didn't finish the story, never read to us again, that I remember. Me and my sibs had gotten into the story, so I wound up finishing it for them.

He's dead now, the cabrón, but my love of spec lit lives.

Not in memory of him--'cause I hate his memory--but just because I don't see anybody else doing it, I'm going to sorta review what I call Spick Spec Lit. I say sorta, 'cause I ain't no reviewer, I don't do it well, and I'm not interested in reviewing. But I do want to concentrate on how Chicanos are portrayed in these genres. When I write about a piece done by a Chicano, yes, there will be more of what might be considered a review.

Unlike mystery and detective novels, there don't seem to be many Chicanos writing fantasy, sci-fi or horror. I don't know why.

I won't attempt some cheesy explanation that we don't write fantasy 'cause our culture is regularly so filled with fantasy--la Llorona, cuanderas and the kind of giant cockroaches that only grow in the barrio--altho it is. I won't say we avoid sci-fi 'cause we have so few who make it to college to even become scientists to be equipped to write it, altho that too is true. Nor will I venture that poverty, repression and discrimination give us enuf everyday horror that writing such fiction would be like adding tabasco to our habañero sauce.

Anyway, I think Spick Spec Lit is an under-reported area, and I'm going to hit it, in my own irreverent, sometimes too-frank of a way. I'll ask my contributor colleagues to help keep me in line.

If anyone out there, all six or seven of you, has any suggestions about writers, books I should cover, let me know. Also, if anyone hears of short stories, etc. that I might not know of, do let me know, even about out-of-print ones.

Friday, February 25, 2005

My wife is a fan of war novelist Tim O'Brien. But I couldn't get past the opening pages of A Lake in the Woods, it was so plodding. I caught a break, though, when around page 18, the author says something like "dear reader, if you think this is slow and plodding, give up because the remainder of my writing is more of the same." So I quit reading.

When does one give up on something that isn't so obvious as O'Brien's engraved invitation to dump the effort? Like I have picked up Denise Chavez' Face of An Angel five times, and each time been so unmoved I haven't gotten more than a few pages beyond where I left off the previous effort. Yet I enthusiastically recommend Loving Pedro Infante, although that one required a month and two tries to get through.

I'm reading Nina Marie Martinez' Caramba! A tale told in turns of the cards. In fact, I've been reading it for 6 weeks now. And I'm about 2/3 through. As its subtitle suggests, Martinez has a clever but by now familiar idea. Each chapter takes off from a loteria card. Martinez tells a bizarre tale set in rural California with a foray into Mexico to free a restless spirit from purgatory. It's a buddy book, its two main characters seemingly heavily influenced by Loving Pedro Infante, although writer Sandra Cisneros' blurb on the back cover calls the novel a chicana "Thelma and Louise". Martinez has some clever character ideas, a born-again mariachi who falls madly in love with a gun-toting pinta, who finds it thrilling that the unknowing paramour might be her brother. Sexual passion links several characters, including a transgender hairdresser frustrated that she can't find a loving man, an older woman tired of on-again off-again romances who urges a suitor to consult a brujo to cast a love spell, and a cast of minor players.

Caramba! is supposed to be fun, but most of the time, it's not. But I keep reading because here and there the writer drops an insight onto the page that takes my breath away. Martinez' keen wit, highly developed sense of irony keep me reading for those occasional gems. So, I'm gonna finish it, and I'll share some of those insightful gems, maybe that will move you to pick up the novel. You'll read it, find it wondrous and grand, then write back to tell me where I went wrong, what I missed.

Or, maybe you'll write to tell me I shoulda followed my instincts and found something else to read.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

You may have read news stories about a group of paramilitary kooks billing selves as “Minutemen”, arming themselves to patrol la frontera with aerial surveillance, pick-em-ups and assault rifles. As the bumper sticker philosopher notes, “bad boys have bad toys”, que no?

The resurgent English-only crowd has come up with a new ballot issue to declare English Arizon’s Official Lanuage. You can read an interesting column by academic and journalist Salomón R. Baldenegro at the Tucson Citizen site,http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=opinion&story_id=021805b5_baldenegro

But that’s not what moves my fingers today. Check this out, excerpted from Baldenegro’s essay (click link in title for full article):

"He couldn't speak English, so me and the other workers made fun of him."- State Rep. Russell Pearce, referring to a teenage co-worker. Arizona Republic, Feb. 11. . . .(I can't help noting the irony. In poor English - using the objective-case "me" rather than the correct nominative-case "I" in the above quote - Pearce offers himself as champion of the English language.). . . .Attacks on languages are really attacks on the language speakers. An e-mail I received a while back regarding one of my columns illustrates this well: "My problem with you Hispanicks (sic) is ... with you peopel (sic) foreverry (sic) trying to force the loser Spanish language on us, demanding we give full spanish (sic) names to our cities and streets."

I count at least two ironies. The schadenfreunde that the language-intolerant crackers cannot use “SAE” (Standard American English) while insisting it be their homestate’s language. Then there’s the pro-diversity critic exercising his own brand of language intolerance, prescriptivist grammar, to fault the opponent’s dialect.

I’m sure the jibe will burn Pearce’s butt, but it leaves me a bit uncomfortable that “my side” fights intolerance with intolerance. Me, I have a soft spot in my ears for vernacular speech of all sorts. To paraphrase Baldenegro, when you attack the language you attack the culture, and that doesn’t sit well with me. Maybe it’s only me. I wish Baldenegro and his fellows good fortune in the battle for the tongues of Arizona.

Monday, February 14, 2005

The most influential book written by a Mexican?

Could it be Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo? The book was published in 1955 so the 50th anniversary may be the appropriate time to consider this book’s power over readers and writers. Both the book and the author are legends. There are several excellent Internet sites about Rulfo; a quick google on his name will bring up some great material. For example:

Rulfo’s reputation is built on only two books: El llano en llamas (1953, The Burning Plain), a collection of short stories, which included Tell Them Not to Kill Me!, and the novel Pedro Páramo. He also wrote several TV scripts and movie screenplays including the classic El Gallo De Oro that starred Lucha Villa and Ignacio López Tarso.

Lesser known are his photographs. Here’s one review of the book of his photographs that Carlos Fuentes helped put together: “The photographs, mainly taken between 1945 and 1955, do not tell stories: they present. The images of people and their land, women in their traditional dress, musicians with their instruments, capture the calm, quiet, inner rhythms of Mexico's rural population. Rulfo extracts unique moments through his photographs; his images of desolate, abandoned buildings, their walls destroyed by artillery shells, are expressions of his nation's painful history. His quietly dramatic landscapes recall the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston while displaying a style that is truly his own.”

Pedro Páramo is considered one of the foundational classics of magic realism, predating One Hundred Years of Solitude by more than a decade. Gabriel García Márquez relates in his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, how he memorized and could recite the text of Pedro Páramo at will.

My questions for readers of this blog:

Where do you place Rulfo in the pantheon of writers?

The dreamy (or nightmarish) quality of Pedro Páramo certainly struck a chord with Mexicans- how about Chicanos? Is it too much to say that Tomás Rivera is Rulfo’s direct literary descendant on this side of the border?

Is Rulfo’s book an essential expression of Mexican-ness? Octavio Paz said that Rulfo is “the only Mexican novelist to have provided us an image, rather than a mere description, of our physical surroundings.”

Cheech and Chong reunion and a new movie

Cheech and Chong appeared together on stage for the first time in 20 years at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen on February 10. They apparently were a big hit and the big news from the reunion was that they are planning a new movie, tentatively titled Cheech and Chong Get Blunt or maybe Grumpy Old Stoners. One possible script for the project was written by Tommy Chong’s daughter, Rae Dawn Chong.

Man, these guys used to make me laugh until I had tears in my eyes. Back when, a great night of entertainment could mean listening to one of their albums, then a little bit of Santana, then a little bit of Cheech and Chong, then a little bit of Santana, then a little bit of ....

Leaving Aztlán. The Center for Visual Art in LoDo (Denver) is presenting the provocative show Leaving Aztlán: Rethinking Contemporary Latino and Chicano Art. The show examines new trends being embraced by Latino and Chicano artists -- and by Latinas and Chicanas -- and in the process explores the convoluted relationships between art and ethnicity. Ten years ago this would have been an overtly political show, but now, although politics are still in the mix, there are also many pieces that express cutting-edge aesthetic theories. Artists from across the country -- including Jesse Amado, Connie Arismendi, Javier Carmona, Alex Donis, Diana Guerrero-Mácia, John Hernandez, Benito Huerta, Chuck Ramirez, Juan Ramos and Rubén Ortiz Torres -- were selected, but Johnson also chose two local talents, Carlos Frésquez and Maria Michelle Gonzalez. A reception for the artists, curator Johnson and collector Cheech Marin is scheduled for February 24 from 6 to 9 pm. Through April 23 at the Center for Visual Art, 1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207.

Friday, February 11, 2005

I am looking forward to this weekend, except for the rain. OK, because of the rain, I cannot get into the garden and turn the earth. I'll start seed in the greenhouse, instead. That'll eat up an hour. And I'll stare longingly at the muddy earth and its as yet unborn lettuce.

I'll head into the house, to the computer. My aunt and dad celebrated their birthdays last week, 70 and 83 years old. I am burning DVDs and printing jewel cases for the whole family. And, because it's a cold wet grey day, I'll get the fireplace going and play the piano.

Then I'll start screaming with rage. Damn, why can't my fingers read the little black marks on the music as well as my lips can read the little black marks on a novel. Reading music, playing it on the piano, is a literacy I have only minimal competence, run hot and cold, but generally, I stumble on something hard. Like html coding. Damn, what a pain in the next, web literacy can become.

Unlike words on paper. I can read anything and make sense of stuff in several languages, even stuff chipped on stone so long as it's greek to me. Imagine, some vato back in Egypt, chipping away at the rosetta stone. He or she was talking to me. I've read his stuff, the middle part at any rate.

Burning DVDs, editing digital video, now there's a literacy few can lay claim to. Anyone can pick up a camera and pull the trigger. And then? If you're not DV-literate, your stuff just twists slowly, slowly in the wind.

More and more, people need to be able to think through their fingers. The knowledge economy demands it. Gad, I love my word processor. It's thinking through your fingers. I spent half a year in the Army working an old manual Royal typewriter. Gad, I loved that machine, the solid crunch of the keys, the snap snap snap as the letters hit the ribbon hit the paper. Or cutting a stencil in preparation for running off several hundred copies of my Battalion newspaper. But I don't miss it because I have my Word Perfect.

So here's a Friday salute to the old literacies. And a tip of the ol' cachuca to the challenge of new literacies and another week sweating them off the theory and into the fingers. An old fart like me, maybe I don't really need all that technology. But how about the kids?

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Chicano Lit in TexasI’ve used up a lot of cyberspace on La Bloga for Califas events, authors, etc. This time it’s Tejas. Next time, Nuevo Mejico? ¿Quién sabe? This could turn into a literary journey through Aztlan, or is it Atzlan?______________________________________________________________________________

The Tenth Annual Latina Letters Conference on Latina Literature and Identity will take place July 14 - 16, 2005. This major conference is sponsored by St. Mary’s University and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. This year’s theme is: Ten Years of Latina Letters, Three Decades of Latina Literature. Announced guests include Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Ana Menéndez, Lourdes Pérez, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. The Conference has issued a Call For Papers. The topic for papers is open and proposals for panels and other conference activities are welcome. Deadline for abstracts of papers is April 29, 2005. Online registration (beginning March 1, 2005) will be available at www.guadalupeculturalarts.org. More information: LatinaLetters@wingspress.com._______________________________________________________________________________

You should notice that the information center for the Latina Letters Conference is Wings Press. The next time you are shopping for a book, do yourself a favor and check out this publisher. Don’t let the fact that it is a “small press from Texas” deter you. The website is www.wingspress.com. Here you can find books by raúlrsalinas, Joy Harjo, Cecile Pineda, and several other emerging or established Chicano/a, native and women authors. You can even get John Howard Griffin’s famous classic Black Like Meas well as Street of the Seven Angels, a previously unpublished novel by Griffin. As the Bloomsbury Review noted: “Wings Press [is] the best little publishing house in Texas. Led by the indefatigable publisher Bryce Milligan, a true San Antonio hero and literary wizard, Wings Press has ventured beyond its south-by-southwestern borders to launch a series of original publications and reprints that deserve as much national recognition and distribution as possible.” For years Bryce Milligan was the driving force behind the San Antonio Literary Festival and Book Fair, an event sorely missed by anyone who ever participated or sat in the audience._____________________________________________________________________________

Left Coast Crime 15is the 2005 version of this popular crime fiction conference. Each year in a different location dozens of writers and hundreds of readers and fans get together to talk about crime fiction and have a good time. This year’s conference takes place in El Paso, TX, from February 24 - 27. The International Guest of Honor is Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the celebrated mystery writer who calls Mexico his home. Taibo has authored several novels, many of which have been translated into English. He has a series that features the one-eyed private detective, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, who was killed off in one novel but brought back by popular demand in the next, with only a minimal explanation from Taibo. Taibo’s books are filled with action, leftist politics, nostalgia, atmosphere, numerous social and cultural references and, quite often, a subtle surreal quality. I enjoy them immensely and recommend him highly.

Taibo’s current writing project is a serialized mystery for the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, in collaboration with Subcomandante Marcos of Los Zapatistas. Taibo and Marcos are writing alternate chapters of the book, entitled Muertos Incomodos, which already is set to be published across the Spanish-speaking world and Italy. An English version of the book may follow. The series of chapters has reportedly boosted La Jornada's Sunday sales by 20%.

I will have the pleasure of appearing on the same Left Coast panel with Paco - a panel entitled : "Authors With Social Consciences: Society's Problems in Detective Fiction.” Other panelists include Denise Hamilton and Betty Webb. Man, with that title we could take the discussion almost anywhere.

I also will participate in a second panel, "Que Pasa Con Latino/a Detectives", with Steven Torres, Michele Martinez, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Torres writes the Precinct Puerto Rican series that features his hero Sheriff Luis Gonzalo. The three books in the series have caught a lot of good attention. If you like police procedurals, especially those set in Puerto Rico, Steven’s your man. Michele Martinez is brand new to the publishing game. For eight years she was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, and if you check out her website you can learn about her tough background growing up on the East Coast and her exciting life as a prosecutor. Her first novel, Most Wanted, hits the streets officially on February 15. Alicia Gaspar de Alba is well-known to anyone who has had even the smallest interest in Chicana Literature. She’s at Left Coast Crime to promote her soon-to-be released novel, Desert Blood. This sounds like a real must-read. It deals with the hundreds of apparently unsolved murders of women in Juárez over the past decade or so. Alicia has been involved with this issue for some time so there’s no doubt that the book will ring with authenticity.

I’m always up for good conversation about crime fiction, any kind of crime fiction but especially Chicano crime fiction, so if you make it to the conference, let me know who you are and what you like to read.

Monday, February 07, 2005

I work for an elementary school teacher, with 1st-2nd grade Spanish-speakers. She and I get along. We avoid arguing over using a word like troca (what's said on the streets) instead of camión (what's in the Spanish dictionary). She admonishes the kids' usage of "Spanglish". I try to make sure they know which word is which and how to spell both.

On the streets they gotta know many words, 'cause they gotta be able to communicate. When somebody yells, "Troca!" they gotta know that means they're about to get run over, otherwise they're removed from the gene pool. They need to know "Camión!" at least for the same reason.

That's what languages are for--communicating. Since they live where 3 are spoken (SpaniSh, English and SpangliCh), they better know all 3, for the reason noted. Later when they get older, they better know the word chida means some vato likes them, or else he may never ask them out on a date. Another possible end to their contributing to the gene pool.

I encourage the kids to use camión rather than troca in their formal, literary writing. I'd rather they became a Gabriel García Marquez instead of like me, although I'm not that bad.

Obviously in my opinion, using what's linguistically called "vulgar" ("vernacular") language isn't vulgar ("morally crude"), per se. It's just valuable as a method of communicating the message you want to convey.

Out on the playground, trying to correct kid's speech to conform to the Spanish dictionary can be as successful as trying to get English-speaking kids to use the word "great" instead of "sweet".

Whatever side you stand on regarding this question, I propose one more to argue over: it should be called SpangliCh, with a "ch" sound, rather than SpangliSh, with the "sh". Why?

Let's face it--Spanglish is their word. Not ours, us SpangliCh-speakers. It's the term of the educated, the linguists, those who guard the sanctity of tongues. Statically, I say. If you're among such educated, you'll maybe not want to check a site like:
http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i07/07b00701.htm where the author discusses at length the existence of "Spanglish". (Site not endorsed by this writer, necessarily.)

On the streets, where what they call "SpangliSh" is used, I don't hear that, I hear "SpangliCh". There's some linguistic explanation of how Spanish speakers learning English acquire this habit, but it's been so long for me, I don't remember the reason. I just know it happens, and that's how it's pronounced.

Although the educated might feel we vulgarists should not be allowed to even name our own vulgar tongue, I say fokk 'em. It's our vernacular, it's our way of communicating. Can't they at least call it the same thing we call it?

In return, I'll call you Hispanic, individually, to your face (including via Internet) and not Chicano, if that's what you want. So, for instance I'd say, "You Hispanos sure got mucho money to buy such a chida troca." If this sounds fair, then gracias for your understanding.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

***Blogmeister's note: darned if I can figure out why AOL won't accept this story with all the links. It's rich with links to more info, so click on the title, above, to view the page in its natural setting***

I'M NOT MAKING UP ANY OF THIS

If You Can Read This, You’re Too Damn Close

A cop in Denver threatens to arrest a woman who is driving a car that displays a bumper sticker that carries the pithy message "Fuck Bush". This becomes a mid-level issue among the radio talk shows. The consensus seems to be that even if the woman had a right to display such a message "she should have known better" and "what happened to common decency?" The cop is disciplined by the Chief.

I Always Thought The Prime Minister Had A Real Way With Words - Oh, Wrong Churchill

Three years after he wrote it, a lot more people get upset over words that a professor uses in an essay about the 9/11 attack. Many of the upset people have, in the past, decried the abuse of what they term “political correctness” to censor someone’s right to free speech, especially on campus. Am I the only one who sees the irony in this? Post columnist Diane Carman has written an excellent column that reminds the University of Colorado that it can demonstrate its expressed commitment to academic and intellectual freedom. Or not, as she says.

For Some Reason This Pissed Me Off

The superintendent of schools in the town of Norwood, 33 miles west of Telluride, bans, yes, bans, Bless Me, Ultima because of “obscene language and paganistic practices.” According to the Denver Post, the superintendent admits that he hasn’t read the book “in its entirety,” and that “there weren’t so many parents who were concerned, but when it was brought to my attention I was concerned”, and that his main concern was the “filthy” language. The teacher who ordered the book apologized for her “error in judgment”. The editor of the Norwood newspaper comments that she believes that “most people and certainly school employees are too afraid to speak on the record.” This is the same book that Laura Bush (Laura Bush!) listed as ninth on a list of 12 books that she highly recommends. Rudolfo Anaya’s response: “Read the book.”

It’s Only The First Amendment So How Important Can It Be?

They say that two is a coincidence, three is a fad, but four is a trend. Do we have a trend yet?

Here are a few more recent situations in Colorado to think about as you ponder the state of free speech in the grand state of Colorado:

Do Italians have the right to have a Columbus Day parade?

Does a public school teacher have the right to display a Mexican flag in her classroom where many of the students are of Mexican heritage?

Do the police have the right to seize bookstore customer purchase records in the interest of protecting neighborhoods from the dangers of illegal meth labs if they are looking for corroboration that a suspect bought a how-to book on manufacturing illegal drugs?

In a high-profile celebrity criminal case, does a newspaper have the right to obtain transcripts of hearings in the case even though such transcripts contain acutely embarrassing details about the victim?

Enough of that.

American Tableau – 2005

I'm walking along a major Denver street on a cool but pleasant day, surrounded by skyscrapers. The wall of a bank provides some protection from a chilly breeze. It's lunch time. Two well-dressed women are haranguing an official-looking Chicano who just placed a parking ticket on their Jaguar. They are quite angry. I check the scene - they are parked in a NO PARKING space. The signs are obvious. The driver screams something about the guy not knowing who her daddy is. Then she asks if the guy is "from here?" I walk away because it can't get any better.

A couple of days later I’m on the same street, same block, same bank. Two guys are pushing a stalled vehicle out of the way of traffic. At least I think that is what they are doing. It gets a little confusing because the apparent driver can’t make up his mind about which direction the other guy should push. One of the guys is an African-American, the other might be Latino. This car definitely is not a Jaguar.

Education

I picked up this tidbit from The Poverty Law News, a weekly newsletter published by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law.

Educational Achievement Reflects Family Background More Than Ethnicity or Immigration

This study by the Rand Corporation finds that the most important factors associated with the educational achievement of children are not race, ethnicity, or immigrant status. Instead, the most critical factors appear to be socioeconomic ones. These factors include parental education levels, neighborhood poverty, parental occupational status, and family income.

Kite Lesson - by Manuel Ramos

Florence, Colorado, 1955

Luis was seven when his father bought a kite and tried to teach him how to fly it.

They walked from their house to the baseball field, overgrown with weeds, and waited for the wind to gather. Luis stood in silence, away from the action.

Jesús was all business as he put together the plastic blue and red thing, attached the string and added a tail of old rags. When he finished his preparations the man chased away the dogs that sniffed at the contraption. He watched the sky for a hint of turbulence, a sign that it was time to launch the toy.

" I learned how to fly kites from my brother Danny. He knew so much about everything, son, so much. He was only nineteen when they killed him in Korea. He would've been a great man. Strong, smart. He taught me about life when I was no older than you, Luis. Lessons that a man needs to know to survive. La vida es dura."

Luis nodded but, as usual, his father lost him. He had heard the story of Danny many times. Jesús's eyes filled with sadness as he spoke of his dead brother. The boy was puzzled by the man's insistence on remembering.The wind rose to a level that appeared to be right. Luis grabbed the kite and held it aloft, causing the wind to catch it. His father clutched the string.

"You should master this art, boy. And it is an art, after all, as well as a science. Kites show the delicate balance between security and the animal urge to let go, to live life in the clouds. Entiendes, chico?"He jerked the string and the kite jumped.

"Let it go, Luis, let the damn thing go." He led the kite into the sky.It was a beautiful kite. It lazily drifted upward to the full white clouds. Sunlight flashed off the plastic sheen creating red, blue and gold streaks.

Jesús reeled out yard after yard of string. The kite hungrily accepted the freedom. The man laughed and hollered and jumped among the weeds.

" There it goes, boy, there it goes! Our kite is now flying with the birds and we did it, we broke the law of gravity. My brother was right."The boy watched the floating, tiny speck of color. He saw birds near the kite, the tail flapping crazily; and he heard his father's laugh, but Luis couldn't understand.

" Hijo, take the string, fly this baby."

Jesús offered the ball of string. He laid it in the boy's hand.

" Let it drift with the breeze. No need to give it any more slack, it's plenty high already."Luis never held the ball. He felt it slip from his hand, saw it drag along the ground. Slowly it rose, so slowly that for years when he thought of this day it was in slow motion black and white. He ran after the string but it was above his head. Suddenly it took off with more speed than the boy had experienced in all of his short life.

Jesús jumped for the string but it was gone. He turned, looked at Luis, then shook his head. He kicked at the dirt with his boot, shrugged weary shoulders and walked back to the house.The kite disappeared over some trees. Luis stared at the empty sky. When he looked for his father, the man was blocks away. Luis ran but he couldn't catch up to him.

__________

A slightly different version of this story originally was published in The Upper Larimer Arts & Times. All rights reserved by Manuel Ramos.

Manuel Ramos

A Light Case of Cultural Appropriation

by RudyG

About my fifth personal groundrule I wrote, "Cultural appropriation (FYI, generally, writing about cultures you're not a part of, like Anglos writing about us, whatever we're called)--I don't like it. There's Anglo writers who I don't think commit cultural appropriation, e.g., John Nichols, but they're rare and few. The rest of them are cabrones. I'll discuss this, in general or specifically."

Okay, so, here's a specific: Allen Steele's Coyote Rising (Ace Books, 2004). Subtitled "A novel of interstellar revolution", it depicts the colonization of the planet Coyote by Earthlings who undergo a "revolution" to decide how the planet will evolve. (Not really a review, but that's not my purpose here.)

Among others, Coyote has a series of Spanish-surnamed characters (presumably Chicano)--Carlos Montero (terrorist/freedom fighter), James Garcia (architect/engineer), et al. I saw none of the baser stereotypical problems with these major characters, i.e., they weren't the formulaic chucos or hot-blooded Latinos we've all come to know and detest. However, what they came across as are white guys who happen to have Spanish names. So what's wrong with that?

There's no depth to them, Chicano-wise. They don't speak any Spanish (not even a good maldición), never make a taco, don't have bultos in their homes, never mention their abuelitos, and never suffered from ethnic bias, etcetera. In other words, they aren't very Chicano; they are completely acculturated. Oreos.

It's a good that Steele recognized Spanish-surnameds may exist in the future. As I said, I have no problem with the characters' overall characters. I guess I just don't like white bread trying to pass for tortillas. I don't know if Steel is a liberal who wanted to include a multicultural cast or a Bushite who just wanted to sell to a larger audience. Doesn't matter to me.

What does matter is what I feel is the unfulfilled promise provided on the dustjacket. Might you, a Chicano, deliberately buy a book because it seemed to include characters you could relate to? Would you feel cheated when you found you'd bought a loaf of Wonderbread, instead? That's how this reader felt. I don't consider this novel a major transgression of cultural appropriation; there's much worse. It's just a light, more frequently appearing example of how Chicanos are being absorbed by the nonChicano writing world: "We'll acknowledge your existence, but without knowing or describing your uniqueness."

Am I saying no Anglo writer should have Chicano characters in their stories, unless they're fully equipped Chicanos--speaking Spanish, eating tacos, etc.? No, because that might be another stereotype. Secondary characters, Chicano or otherwise, aren't necessarily very developed in short stories, for instance. They may be a little flat, as it's termed. And in some way, it's positive when we're no longer overlooked. But in the case of major characters--Chicano ones--I feel an author should somehow explain why NONE of those Chicanos really seem like Chicanos. Total acculturation? Okay, then we can argue about that.

Cultural appropriation is not a simple question to resolve in a short piece like this. Blame history for that, and everyone's grandparents who went along with creating that history. I'm not here to define what would make Chicano characters, written up by an Anglo, acceptable to Chicanos. A defense of Steele's portrayal might be that in the future, everybody will be acculturated and English-speaking, society having dissipated our picoso ingredients into a masa of bleached wheat dough. If that's the case, then the arena of my contention would be: what does history show and how will the future unfold? That's a discussion for elsewhere.

Maybe I just want some truth-in-advertising and Steele's dustjacket rewritten; "Only the characters' names are Chicanoesque, nothing else." Then I'd say, gracias for the warning.